I used to be now not round in 1974 to witness the primary tv time out of Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen. Broadcast most effective seven years after intercourse between males used to be in part decriminalised in England and Wales, this enigmatic movie used to be beamed into the country’s residing rooms with an audacity that continues to be giddying as of late.
Some commentators have prompt that the movie “seems a world away” from the gritty social statement of Clarke’s Scum (1977) and The Company (1989). However Penda’s Fen recognises that unruly want – manifested inside the movie in Blakean visions of angels, demons and the pagan King Penda – is political.
Stephen, a classical music-loving, left-wing-despising rector’s son, lives a number of the inexperienced and delightful Malvern Hills, the place he performs at being an impeccably uniformed cadet and struggles to suppress his delirious sexual want for different boys.
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This newsletter is a part of a chain highlighting sensible motion pictures that are supposed to be extra widely recognized and firmly a part of the canon of queer cinema .
In his visions, the trail of least resistance – that of being the younger guy everybody desires him to be – is championed through the sinister figures of the Mom and Father of England (modelled on conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge). This trail would provide him “the right to inherit power”.
However enjoying the function of the instantly, typical boy weighs closely on Stephen, and he slips farther from the narratives he longs to imagine in. Haunted through a chain of actual and imagined encounters with angels, demons and England’s pagan previous, Stephen starts to questions all he is aware of about himself – his faith, politics and sexuality.
After I in any case noticed Penda’s Fen after its re-release through the BFI in 2016, it used to be uncannily acquainted. Like Stephen, I grew up because the homosexual son of a rector within the rural West Midlands, torn between the lures and impossibilities of sexual conference.
The political rhetoric of the LGBT+ neighborhood within the Nineteen Nineties created social have an effect on through talking in very clean phrases about non-straight identities. This rhetoric, for the sake of readability, regularly presented slim definitions of the traits and attributes that made any individual definitively LGBT+.
But it surely did result in growth, that includes in campaigns for the repeal of segment 28 of the Native Govt Act 1988, which banned any affirmative presentation of homosexuality through native government, together with faculties. It additionally used to be utilized in campaigns that ended in the reducing of the age of consent for homosexual intercourse to 16, consistent with heterosexual intercourse.
Then again, this slim view left me with an uncomfortable sense that my inconsistencies and contradictions intended that I used to be by no means fairly, by no means simply, homosexual. In spite of being a treasured time period as I got here out and claimed a social identification and a neighborhood, it did not seize the complexities of my enjoy in one phrase.
Those inconsistencies and complexities shine in queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s not-quite-definition of “queer”: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”
Sedgwick means that queerness is one of those structural messiness; a ways from being a neat summing-up of any individual’s identification, it’s the place the wishes and behaviours which make up an individual’s sexuality don’t fairly upload up, and so break out complete figuring out.
Loving your personal strangeness
For me, the best queer motion pictures aren’t the ones which search to verify the parable of strong identification however, as a substitute, open those meshes of risk. I do know of no movie which does this higher than Penda’s Fen.
When the movie starts, Stephen stamps out all his flickering wants. He clings to uncomplicated notions of gender, intercourse and country, the 3 pillars that can protected his energy as a person in society.
Through the tip, he has encountered the ghost of the composer Elgar, fantasised about schoolmates in homoerotic rugby scrums, and came upon that he’s followed and not more English than he imagined. On this “Gnostic anarcho-punk anti-pastoral visionary work of English art”, because the author Gary Budden calls it, all Stephen’s certainties shatter.
As he in the end stands within the hills’ top puts, tempted through the Mom and Father of England to repress confusion and embody their thought of normality in a folk-horror echo of Christ’s temptation within the desolate tract, his rejection turns into a radiant queer manifesto:
“I am … nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness … I am mud and flame!”
Dust and flame is what I used to be as a youngster residing within the shadow of those self same hills: the earthy and the fiery, the tangible and the transcendent, the banal and the unconventional, the protected and the misplaced. This used to be – even supposing I didn’t realise it on the time – queerness, a phrase theorist Lee Edelman writes “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one”.
No movie that I do know captures this feeling of slipping, sliding, needing self so smartly as Penda’s Fen. Everybody who has ever felt the constituent portions of their very own sexuality refusing to align must watch the movie and fall in love with their very own strangeness.
Penda’s Fen, like queerness, resists explicit interpretation. It’s telling that the visionary commissioning editor David Rose, who oversaw the BBC Birmingham drama division and greenlit Penda’s Fen, confessed that he “didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be”. This perspective is not possible in commissioners as of late.
Clarke’s movie is a mix of people horror motifs, the politics of society and character-driven drama that cracks open that means simply because the church flooring fractures when Stephen performs the organ discordantly.
Audience new to the movie must enjoy its bizarre ultimate series with out spoilers, however I can say that the last photographs of Stephen – that
“strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant” protagonist – be offering me the joys of queerness’s unsettled, unsettle-able politics.
